----- Original Message ---- From: Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com>
That aspect is the social ontological form of the premise of “organic unity” ("man is largely a creature of circumstances and changes with them"). In his essay, Keynes points to this as the basis of the distinction Marshall drew "between the objects and methods of the mathematical sciences and those of the social sciences" (p. 197) and as constituting "the profundity of his [Marshall's] insight into the true character of his subject in its highest and most useful developments.” (p. 188) In support of the interpretive claim, he quotes Marshall making a criticism, on this basis, of "classical" political economy very similar to Marx's in the Grundrisse (<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm>).
[WS:] Also to the good old methodenstreit (historicism vs. determininsm,) no?. It is interesting to see how these old philosophical debates about the nature of the world and human knowledge of it never really die - they just repeat themselves endlessly. It seems that cognitive psychology can offer some insights here - determinism is a cognitive frame adopted by people who have low tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and contingency - they crave order and not surprisingly they find it. Historicims is a cognitive frame prefered by those who who are at ease with uncertainty and abhor rigidity of order (see for example the piece on "motivated cognition" summarizing literature in this area http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf.) and inf refuge in ambiguity and contingency.
Hence, the adherents of these two approaches are bound to talk past each other, because their differfences are not rational but pre-rational: they are grounded in their emotional makeup and cannot be solved through reasoning or facts.
Wojtek